How to build clients

Sometimes you wish only to call Soaplab2 services, not to
provide them. Of course, you may do it from the full Soaplab2
installation but you can also make it with less steps (for example,
you do not need to know how to create services metadata and how to
deploy services, you even do not need to run any special server).

This document describes how to install few internal Soaplab2
clients. Even though they cover the full functionality of Soaplab2
services, they are not the best user-friendly clients. Their main
purpose is to test Soaplab2 servers, or to be used in batch scripts
for running Soaplab2 services repeatedly.

For the real useful and fully user-supportive clients check these
other documents:

Soaplab basic clients are installed and built by Ant. The
details about built-time properties (however, none of them is
mandatory for Soaplab2 clients) and few other Ant tricks are described
in the main build guide.

Installing Soaplab2 clients

Once you have Soaplab2 in your directory, by default named
soaplab2, type:

ant install-clients

And that's it.

Once finished, it suggests to use the basic Soaplab2 command-line client. In order to do it
you need to know a URL of a Soaplab2 server - and you can call its
services. Few examples (on Windows machines, change the slashes to
backslashes):

Configuration of Soaplab2 clients

The command-line client shown above (and few others, as well) can use
a client property file to define which Soaplab2 server to connect
to. Having such client property file you save some command-line
options.

The client property file is called, very imaginatively, a
soaplab.client.properties and should be put into any
directory specified in the environment variable CLASSPATH. By
default, the installation task of Soaplab2 clients creates this file
from a template src/etc/config/soaplab.client.properties and
puts it in the build/classes.

Or, you can put your properties into any file, for example the
testing.client.properties, and add a line to the file
build.properties (in the Soaplab2 main directory):